The End of the Gay Rights Revolution: How Hubris and Overreach Threaten Gay Freedom

by Ronan McCrea

The gay rights movement in the West has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams – but this success seems suddenly fragile. Ronan McCrea’s important book argues that this is no blip. Forces favourable to gay rights – such as the wider cultural shift towards greater sexual freedom – are weakening, while political developments, cultural changes and migration patterns mean that sources of opposition, both old and new, are gaining strength. The gay rights movement is ill-equipped to meet this challenge. Convinced that history is on its side, the movement has expanded its aims and made new enemies while refusing to consider whether elements of the sexual freedoms it fought for have had unforeseen downsides, including for gay people themselves.

For the gay rights revolution to endure, a fundamental reconsideration of its goals, its history and its limits is required. Anyone wanting to understand the challenges faced by gay rights and the wider liberal project needs to read this timely warning.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction

208 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2025

Reviews

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wide-ranging, heterodox book by a homosexual thinker who believes that after the breathtaking success the gay community has achieved since the 1960s sexual revolution, the gay community today ought to temper its demands and draw back from pursuing more radical changes in culture. In The End of the Gay Rights Revolution: How Hubris and Overreach Threaten Gay Freedom Ronan McCrea charts a thoughtful, nuanced path through the culture wars and sexual politics, but he will nevertheless be critiqued from the right and from the left. Many social conservatives will never accept same-sex marriage as a concept or same-sex relationships as morally valid while social liberals (particularly within the gay community itself) will regard McCrea as championing heteronormative convention, especially his clarion call towards the end of the book for gay men to suppress their sexual urges and promiscuity in pursuit of deeper, more monogamous relationships.

McCrea begins by showcasing just how radical have been the gains by the gay community compared to mere decades ago (it should be noted, McCrea’s book is mostly addressed to gay men, not lesbians). Throughout much of the West, gay men and lesbians have had their romantic relationships destigmatized in the public eye, they are able to marry and enjoy the benefits that come with this institution, they are regularly depicted positively and widely in media, and they can openly celebrate themselves through events like Pride Month. This is a far cry from the 1950s.

And yet the evolution in public mores brought on by the sexual revolution of the 1960s didn’t begin with gays in the vanguard; gays have been, and always will be, a small percentage of the population (2-4%), dependent upon a straight majority for their continued access to rights, and the small gay community followed along as mere sidekicks in the sexual revolution that liberalized divorce laws, gave greater access to contraception and abortion, and that became more tolerant of sex outside of marriage. Indeed, McCrea points out that early on, even as politicians adopted laws that decriminalized homosexual behaviour, homosexuality was still largely viewed negatively, much like a disability, rather than a sexual identity/orientation deserving applause. The gay community in the USA was able to have homosexuality decriminalized not by convincing courts that homosexuality was equal to heterosexuality but by appealing to personal liberty: “when the claim was based on an argument that homosexuality per se deserved protection, it lost. But when gay rights advocates successfully reframed the issue as one of respect for sexual autonomy and privacy in general, they won” (pp. 30-31).

McCrea cautions that the enormous success the gay community has achieved in legal protection and moral acceptance ought to be celebrated, but also cannot be assumed to be eternal. Throughout history there have been cultural swings where society shifts rightward and then leftward and vice versa (one thinks of the 1950s compared to the 1960s and, as McCrea insists, one might view the 2010s as a time of conservative backlash against a more liberal 2020s, p. 47). How many people in the 2010s would have ever expected for Roe v. Wade to be overturned in 2022?

McCrea makes an interesting point that the 1960s and the Ronald Reagan years were surprising, complementary bedfellows, as both the left and the right (unwittingly) sought to reduce the state’s scope when it came to personal matters (Canadian prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau famously declared that “The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation” in 1967). McCrea writes, “social conservatives in the 2020s are increasingly realizing that the ‘small-state conservatism’ they espoused did not serve opponents of the sexual revolution. If a party’s central message is individual freedom and shrinking the state, in the long run it will never be an effective advocate for the maintenance of conservative approaches to sex that necessarily seek to limit individual choice and freedom in sexual matters” (p. 51).

This helps to explain the rise of the postliberal right and its strategy to reform administrations so that their policies enforce conservative values, which McCrea addresses, along with the surge of Muslims in Europe and what that means for Europe’s sexual politics. Traditional politics has been upended and a realignment is underway.

The mixing of issues of religion, migration and minority rights has unsettled previous approaches. The left, traditionally anti-clerical but pro-immigration, has struggled to come up with a united response to claims that restrictions on religious influence should be relaxed in order to accommodate the religiosity of some migrant-origin communities. The right, traditionally favourable to religion but more sceptical of migration, has been divided between those who welcome the challenge to secular predominance this religiosity involves and those who see the accommodation of minority identities as a threat to national identity (p. 59).

Page 77 of McCrea’s book is particularly insightful as he explains that not everyone experienced the sexual revolution as a resounding success. Yes, women who felt trapped in oppressive marriages were able to leave their bullying husbands behind and gay couples could be more openly expressive with their affections in public, but the sexual revolution dismantled as much as it liberated. The pre-1960s culture had built-in conventions that, while restrictive to sexual liberals, also provided guiding structures that brought stability and order. Much of this has been flung into flux since then. I think about this even within my own subculture of evangelicalism. I believe that more conservative Christians see in complementarianism a reassuring, more straightforward understanding of what it means to be distinctly male and distinctly female and what these gender roles require; for egalitarians, there is more “grey,” especially if you are a conservative egalitarian who doesn’t go all the way to be affirming on LGBTQ+ matters. McCrea (empathetically) writes:

The changes of the past few decades also involve more abstract losses. We have endless books and films recounting how oppressive and restrictive many people found the conformist and conservative culture of the 1950s. But there must have been a large number of people (though probably not many gay people) who appreciated the sense of structure and order that such a society had. It must have given some people a sense of meaning and belonging to adhere to established gender roles and to feel that your marriage and reproduction fitted into a scheme that was shared by society as a whole. Taking part in long-established patterns and institutions, such as heterosexual marriage, also linked your life to the life that your parents and grandparents had lived in a way that must have been comforting, particularly when, as inevitably happens, one generation dies and another is born.

For those people, a world where gender roles, sexual partners and having children all become matters which are purely a matter of individual decision, where there are no expectations of what is the norm and in which a myriad of different kinds of family and relationships is the rule, may well have been a world that felt discombobulating, disconnected and less meaningful. There is no point in simply telling such people that they should love these changes. Like advocates of liberal progressivism more generally, partisans of gay rights should accept the reality that some people just prefer order and conformity to freedom and experimentation.

My hunch is that these feelings of loss are somewhat underreported because our accounts of those more conservative times come from the people who wrote books and made films. The people who tend to write books and make films are from the segment of society that tends to be less conformist, the very group most likely to have found the conservative set-up stifling and to have found their quality of life enhanced by its overthrow. I am one of the people for whom (like most gay people) the sexual revolution was a deliverance and a joy but that was not the case for everyone and, as memories of the reality of sexual oppression fade, nostalgia for the sense of meaning and order that the old order had may grow (p. 77).

McCrea believes that the gay rights movement should disentangle itself from pushing for more radical advocacy and trans issues. This is a challenge as, in McCrea’s telling, those who hold the most radical views among gays continue to exercise leadership in social justice organizations. Within the gay community, there were always those who simply wanted equal recognition (i.e. marriage equality) and there were more radical queers who actively sought to transgress culture, actively rejecting marriage as a heterosexual institution (see Michael Warner’s influential and utterly fascinating book The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. McCrea asserts that once gay marriage was gained, the former group disengaged from activism, content to live life with their spouse; but the latter group continues to hunger for revolution and has wedded itself to the trans movement (p. 99). This is a fatal mistake, in McCrea’s view:

With each expansion in the movement’s agenda, new enemies are made. This has included many feminists, traditionally staunch advocates of gay rights, who have been alienated by the embrace of self-ID. By falling prey to the fantasy that the triumph of their cause is historically inevitable, gay rights organizations are risking making the task of holding on to what gay people have achieved much harder. They are also making it much more difficult for gay rights campaigns in areas of the world where homophobic laws and norms still predominate to get off the ground. It is hard for African gay rights activists to argue that they just want decriminalization of same-sex activity and to be left alone when Western gay rights organizations are insisting that fundamental changes to the idea of what is a man and woman are an intrinsic element of the gay rights agenda (now shackled to an ever-lengthening list of other causes in the LGBTQIA+ acronym) and that businesses have the duty to take a dizzying range of active steps to celebrate their gay employees (p. 92).

This is the overreach that McCrea addresses throughout the book. The radical queer community hasn't been appeased by much of the West's public, enthusiastic acceptance of homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and revelry during Pride Month. The radical queer community pushes for drag queen story hour for children, demands transwomen be allowed in female-only spaces and sports, and wants children to be able to undergo drastic treatments and surgeries if they believe they are transgender. This extremism has fanned the flames of a conservative backlash that not only has moved to counter the transgender agenda but that has now (much to McCrea's chagrin), returned to scrutinizing and targeting the gay community. To avoid the collateral damage of this conservative backlash, McCrea thinks the gay community should be content with the (astounding) gains it has already garnered.

As a gay man, McCrea has benefited from the sexual revolution and believes that two consenting adults are free to engage in whatever kind of sexual activity they want, but he also critiques the excesses of gay culture, especially its rampant promiscuity (p. 149). As mentioned above, towards the end of the book, McCrea makes an impassioned plea for gay men to constrain their urges for sex for the greater good of enjoying longterm, stable, monogamous relationships (which is what gay men report wanting). Despite positive portrayals of monogamous gay marriage like Cam and Mitchell on Modern Family, the gay subculture has high levels of promiscuity. One survey found that 25% of respondents had 13+ partners per year and data also demonstrated that gay men in civil unions “had more encounters outside their relationships than straight or lesbian couples;”40% of gay men had sexual encounters with other men with the permission of their partner (p. 164). McCrea notes the irony that:

For straight people, marriage pre-dated sexual freedom; for gay people, sexual freedom created marriage. What I mean by this is that the first step in the gay sexual revolution was decriminalization of gay sex while legalization of gay marriage (and therefore the idea of gay sex within marriage) was the final step. This was the opposite of the heterosexual experience in which legitimate sex within marriage was the starting point and sex outside marriage the innovation. This meant that from the early stages of the gay rights revolution right up until around a decade ago, gay people had been given the right to have sex but not the right to build that sexual relationship towards an eventual marriage (p. 115)

This is a thought-provoking and lively book. As a social conservative myself, I ultimately disagree with McCrea on sexual politics, but I appreciate the “insider” criticism he bravely and bracingly provides in The End of the Gay Rights Revolution. McCrea grew up in Ireland but I do not know if he is religious; still, as an evangelical I can also appreciate his exhortation for his fellow gays to restrain themselves sexually and approach fidelity in their romantic relationships. McCrea sums up his book:

The central argument of this book has been that if gay freedom is to take on a more balanced and sustainable form, it will be necessary for the gay rights movement both to realize how vulnerable its victories are and to break with the libertine, freedom-and-choice-maximizing ethos of the sexual revolution. If gay freedom can be portrayed as being radically inconsistent with moderate conservative approaches to sex, gender and family its chances of long-term survival will be low (p. 170).

[Joey · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m about to write a scathing review this week. I just have to soft launch my general attitude about this book. The framing of the argument, the lack of readership on canon texts, the Catholicism… might actually email him directly.

[Hugo Collingridge · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ronan McCrea is right about a lot of things in this book. Our freedoms as Gay people are hard won and are very fragile. He is right to say that history does not have an 'arc' and that Western society could easily be rolled back in a socially conservative direction. Indeed in many ways this is already happening. Even I find 'LGBTQ+' a bit confusing. And some of us were absolutely wrong to think that corporations' support for our rights was anything more than skin deep. Defending what we've got instead of pushing for ever more would probably be a good strategy. But I am not convinced that being more 'modest' and moderating our behaviour will stop the terrifying massed ranks of homophobes building on the horizon from rolling us over. They hate us for what we are, not what we do.

[Vanessa]

Mixed bag, as expected. Here is my book report. Overall, I found the angle he approached topics from was pretty novel. Woo, thought experiments, some neat, some silly--hence the length of this review.

"Gay acceptance" is falling, even in countries where we took for granted that it was secured forever. It was only a minute ago that gay rights went "mainstream," so they very well might vanish just as fast, and just as totally.

Laying out the polling data is useful for driving the point home, Western activists do need reminders that not everywhere looks the exact same at the US, and I really am compelled by McCrea's argument that LGBTQ+ activism relies too much on the belief that the pure inertia of "being on the 'right side of history'" will carry them to total victory, but I'm like...we know we're in trouble. Especially in 2026.


1

So, he's frustrated that people think gay rights are secured forever 'n ever. Yet he also scolds nasty nasty gay overreach, such as...:

- The HRC's Corporate Equality Index, which "called for business (sic??) to adopt guidelines that 'prohibit philanthropic support of non-religious organizations with an explicit policy of discrimination towards LGBTQ+ people.'" This Index doesn't need to be passed for a business to stay afloat. And yeah, I think it's good that we're watching out for businesses that support "explicit" "discrimination." He likens this part of the Index to George Bush's "you're either with us or against us" beliefs, which...you're kidding. Yeah, you're against us if you, uh, fund discrimination. That's kinda the definition of "against us." (Also anyone can still fund anti-gay religious orgs.)
-Compulsory integration tests that "promote knowledge of, or even make the grant of residency [...] contingent on being in agreement with secular and liberal principles." Meanwhile, he argues that gay rights are in peril because Muslim populations are generally less keen on gay rights and are increasing demographically in Europe. Well, according to the polls, these questions aren't exactly filtering out all the homophobes, so clearly this overreach isn't accomplishing much anyways.

Okay. What do you want, then? Should we let ourselves get steamrolled and lose those rights you're saying we should fight for? Should we shut up and wait for the tides to turn back while doing absolutely nothing?

Honestly very helpful to point out that you or I would find it hard to adjust to a conservative or religious society, and we'd be expected to hold on to our liberal, secular beliefs--and so it's reasonable to accept that people from those conservative societies would do the same in a liberal society. Genuinely made me think: "Everyone assumed, as I used to, that a society that tolerated sexual freedom and homosexuality was so obviously preferable that those exposed to such a society would abandon their support for more conservative and less liberal approaches." Believing this is just another form of believing "We are more modern than you, we are more evolved than you, your culture is just slower to catch up to us." It also IS a sign of forcible cultural assimilation to ask of immigrants, "Do you believe what I believe?"

But. But I'm so sorry, I cannot believe he is "Ummm, you don't think people should be bigots? Looks like YOU'RE the bigot"ing in a book about how the stupid gays are letting their rights erode away.

That's because his ultimate argument for how we can fix this is for gay men to stop having so much gosh darn casual sex.

2

Anecdotal evidence from my gay male friends and the polling data in this book show that hookup culture isn't without its agonies, from sexually transmitted diseases to feeling disconnected from real companionship and a stable future. And I agree with McCrea that the "queer" community's insistence on considering themselves sexual rebels and tradition-breakers is unhelpful and annoying--the way these people sometimes speak of lesbian couples who want to get married and adopt a dog is embarrassing, like being non-het comes with a gene that HATES diamond rings and the 9-5. AND I was compelled by his discussion about how heterosexuals started out with marriage and fought for sexual freedom, while the gay community started out with sexual freedom and fought for marriage (well, kinda--gay sex was decriminalized decades before gay marriage became legal pretty much everywhere), so their expression of ultimate "freedom" is inherently different.

Aaaaaand yes, the icky conservatives think gay men having sex is soooooo gross. But I really don't think fewer gay men having casual sex and instead following all the rules of a sexually modest society will change anyone's mind on anything. We are so beyond that. They're talking about kids identifying as cats and using litter boxes on Fox News, my man. Besides...doesn't history show that people are more willing to let gay men have sex than let them play pretend at being nuclear families?

The fact that this single argument took up, like, two full chapters, plus countless rehashings throughout the rest of the book, made it sound like a personal grievance he reverse engineered into a book.

3

Other points about gay activist tactics made more sense to me. There's been a simmering sentiment in corners of the community that irreversibly and unquestioningly going from "gays, lesbians, and bisexuals" to "LGBTQIA+" isn't helping anyone. I liked his explanation that this is especially damaging in parts of the world where life is much, much more dangerous for boring ol' homosexuals--where they don't even have basic rights to live and let live. Iit's catastrophic for activists' simple asks (decriminilization, protection from housing/job discrimination) to be haunted by the spectre of the Western movement demanding things that, even if you agree with them, you have to admit require more explanation, more evidence, more of a suspension (or destruction) of other beliefs.

The symbol '+' is particularly damaging in this regard, as it suggests that the movement aims at changes so open-ended that it requires changes to accomodate concepts and identitites that have not yet achieved linguistic categorisation.

He's right that the LGBTQIA+ community requires the support of the darn straights because it is, in terms of numbers, so small. And I feel like people are so certain that they're right, that modernity and more freedom is better, that if they just repeat the same slogans a thousand times, eventually time will bow down to them and they'll get what they want, because Rightness Must Prevail. But the reality is that a lot of people's exposure to "queeeeeers" that aren't garden-variety gays and lesbians are, like, anime PFP teens on Twitter telling people to kill themselves or get raped to death, and debates that even my most liberal normie family and acquaintances can't wrap their heads around, like men who transitioned at 30 in women's sport.

However, that split is never happening, and I think it'd leave both groups worse for wear. I just think we should all start behaving better and figure out that accusing everyone who glances over the fence to be evil isn't helping.

4

Maybe this book would be better off as a Substack rant? Maybe this review would be too. Anyways. Here is a quote that I think summarizes my beliefs on soooo many things:

While the state should not seek to legislate for private sexual morality of consenting adults, this does not mean that cultural norms can never distinguish between behaviours that are regarded as conducive to flourishing and those that are not.

[Tomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do you think that the advance of gay rights, like the advance of other liberal causes, is historically inevitable? Well, think again... Gallup polls in America show support for LGBTQ+ causes falling, driven by the wider socio-political swing towards conservatism; Europe, meanwhile, is undergoing major demographic changes due to the increasing numbers of Muslim migrants, whose younger generations, just like their Christian peers, are often turning out to be even more devout than their parents. Making matters worse is the hubris of the major gay rights organisations, which insist on making ever more excessive demands on behalf of ever more laughable identities, to say nothing of gay culture itself which, by taking to its extreme the no-rules-other-than-consent mantra of the sexual revolution, has run itself into erotic exhaustion: the majority of gay men, according to survey upon survey, yearn constantly for a meaningful monogamous relationship, but yield repeatedly to the instant gratification of a readily-available hookup, until every prospect for romance is wasted.

McCrea argues that just like the economy needs regulation to achieve the best outcomes, so does the sexual market. One wishes he showed a bit less innocence in calling upon gays (or, in fact, anybody else) to rein in their desires, but it's hard to argue with the claim that a certain degree of sexual frustration is part of a healthy and fulfilling sex life. Gay men will always be a minority in the world and, as a minority, it's high time they realise that their well-being depends on the good grace of the straight majority, which might easily be swept away with the changes in social and political tides, quickened by the grating stridency of gay rights campaigners and the libertinism of gay culture. There is nothing inherent in the passage of history that guarantees the continuation of the kind of miraculous freedom that sexual minorities have enjoyed in the past two decades after centuries of oppression. And you don't even have to look beyond the liberal democratic enclave of the West to see that anti-gay sentiment is just as contemporary as gay freedom.

[Sonya · Rating 1 out of 5]

An extremely cowardly and disappointing book lacking imagination or empathy about the experience of demographics of queer people other than the author’s own. The premise is that homosexuality is only recently accepted in western culture, and hence we shouldn’t shake the boat by demanding too much, including support for, inter alia, trans people or people who indulge in what the author assumes is sexual excess (note the author’s internalized gay panic). Not only does this milk toast premise erase the role of trans and other gender non-conforming people in achieving gay rights in the first place, but it lends itself to more disturbing implications of a politics of rampant selfishness.

[Elaine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well researched and very thoughtfully set out. I had listened to a few podcasts with the author and sometimes that can sort of spoil the book, but there was more than enough that really made it worth a read.

It won't get attention in the circles it needs to get attention, but 10 years from now I think it will emerge to have been very prescient.

[Ethan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gay people need to read this immediately